National Building Museum launches education initiatives

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The National Building Museum (NBM) launched its first design education program to national audiences, offering a curriculum that provides math, science, and engineering curricula connections—disciplines that decidedly support America’s economic competitive edge in the changing, international marketplace. With 20 years of design education experience, the NBM’s national launch fills a growing need to make design and art education relevant to math and science subject areas, and education in general. In addition to meeting math and science standards, the NBM curricula meet standards in visual arts, social studies, technology, and language arts.

The Bridge Basics program is the first of several education initiatives the museum is launching nationally. Bridge Basics teaches fifth through ninth graders about bridge engineering and design through creative lesson plans where students are challenged to solve transportation problems while balancing issues of materials, cost, geography, and aesthetics. The program helps students meet math standards in geometry, measurement, data analysis and probability, and problem solving. It also cultivates an understanding of scientific inquiry, the use and ability of technologies, and the attributes of design and engineering.

Bridge Basics and other museum programs address U.S. labor shortages and low academic performance in the fields of math, science, and engineering—issues that have received increased attention along with the President’s proposed American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI). This initiative, which has received strong bipartisan support in Congress since its proposal earlier this year, emphasizes the importance of investing in math and science education to enable the nation’s youth to succeed in these fields and improve America’s competitiveness globally.

The museum is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Labor to introduce the Design Apprenticeship Program: Building Blocks (DAP) to students across the country. DAP presents high school students with a design challenge for which they conceive, develop, test, and construct a solution. The program fosters critical thinking, problem solving, and communication skills necessary for life and applicable in all settings. It meets national standards of learning in math, science, technology, social studies, and arts. The program has been successfully used at the museum since 2000 and will be available nationwide the summer of 2007.

The national Bridge Basics and DAP launches will be followed by the development of national curricula for City By Design, an urban planning curriculum for kindergarten through sixth graders, and the proposed launch of Investigating Where We Live, a photography, creative writing, and exhibition design program for secondary students.

The NBM programs are strong examples of the types of learning opportunities beyond traditional classroom education. As a cultural institution chartered by Congress, the NBM is uniquely poised to create, foster, and bring added relevance to design education on a national level, strengthening student performance in schools across the country.